Inside the V&A’s Alexander McQueen exhibition Savage Beauty

The V&A has unveiled its Alexander McQueen exhibition Savage Beauty, which includes a holographic Kate Moss.

The show, which opens to the public this weekend, has been designed by Gainsbury and Whiting, the production company that collaborated with McQueen on his catwalk shows.

Sam Gainsbury is creative director on the show and Anna Whiting consultant producer. They have collaborated with production designer Joseph Bennett.

It is the same team that was behind the original Savage Beauty show held in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2011, although the exhibition has been updated for the V&A with new features added.

There are additional garments and accessories, rare early pieces, loans from private collectors and a new section focusing on McQueen’s London collections. The show has been curated by V&A senior curator of fashion Claire Wilcox.

The mixed media design uses installation, music and film and there is a dedicated gallery recreating the moment Kate Moss appeared in an organza gown at the Widows of Culloden catwalk show in 2006. It uses pepper’s ghost projection techniques to create a 3D holographic image.

Elsewhere, at the heart of the exhibition, a double height gallery hosts the Cabinet of Curiosities displaying more than 120 garments while also running AV of most of McQueen’s shows.

The show is divisible by themes which are tackled across ten rooms and include Romantic Gothic; Romantic Primitivism, which focuses on McQueen’s fascination with the animal world; Romantic Nationalism which looks at heritage and ancestry; and Romantic Naturalism.

With 240 ensembles and accessories, the V&A says the show hosts the largest number of McQueen ensembles and accessories ever seen in one place.